15 research outputs found

    Understanding retail gasoline pricing:An empirical approach

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    Retail gasoline markets offer an abundance of price data at the daily and, more recently, hourly level. Firms in this industry use sophisticated price strategies. Moreover, there have been a number of important recent market developments. All this makes retail gasoline a promising industry to study in order to enhance our understanding of the functioning of markets. We focus on several previously unexplored questions: What are the effects of the increasing importance of unmanned retailing on competition? What is the role of retail price recommendations and discounts in markets with significant inter-temporal price uncertainty? And finally, does lower price uncertainty always mean less search irrespective of consumer risk preferences? This thesis provides a number of insights into these issues

    Risk and Loss Aversion, Price Uncertainty and the Implications for Consumer Search

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    Do the choices of consumers who search for a product's best price exhibit risk neutral, risk averse or loss averse risk attitudes? We study how in a problem of sequential search with costless recall the relation between a consumer's willingness to pay for continued search and the level of price uncertainty depends on her risk preferences. Independent of the current best price, an increase in price uncertainty encourages continued search when consumers are risk neutral. However, we prove that theory predicts an inversion when consumers are either risk or loss averse. In those cases, an increase in price uncertainty only increases the consumer's willingness to pay (WTP) for continued search if the current best price is sufficiently low. We subsequently use this observation in an empirical test to identify between different risk preferences in a stylized problem of sequential search. In line with the inversion, we find that a reduction in price uncertainty decreases the WTP for continued search when the current best price is low but increases the WTP when it is high. While at odds with the assumption of risk neutrality, this finding is consistent with models of consumer risk and/or loss aversion. Moreover, the model parameters of risk and loss aversion that lead to the best empirical fit have values similar to those estimated for other decision domains

    The impact of process innovation on prices:Evidence from automated fuel retailing in The Netherlands

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    In the last decade, many European countries have seen a sharp increase in the number of automated fueling stations. We study the effect of this process innovation on prices at stations that are automated and their competitors using a difference-in-differences matching strategy. Our estimates show that prices at automated stations drop by 1.7 to 3.2% immediately after conversion and stabilize at this lower level. Unlike previous studies, our estimates do not reveal a difference in impact between early and later adopters of automation. Indicative of competitive spillovers, prices at stations within 2 km of an automated station decrease on average with a precisely estimated 0.2%. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

    Risk and Loss Aversion, Price Uncertainty and the Implications for Consumer Search

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    Detailed data and changes in market structure:the move to unmanned gasoline service stations

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    We illustrate the impact of detailed data in empirical economic research by considering how the increased data availability has changed the scope and focus of studies on retail gasoline pricing. We show how high-volume, high-frequency price data help to identify and explain long-term trends using original data for the Dutch retail gasoline market. We find that 22% of the observed increase in the highway/off-highway price gap can be explained by the trend towards more unmanned stations; another 13% can be explained by major-to-non-major re-brandings. In one of the first applications of event study analysis to non-financial price data, we show that the adjustment to the new, lower price level is almost immediate in case of manned-to-unmanned conversions but takes one to two months in case of major-to-non-major re-brandings. The impact of both events is asymmetric with no measurable price impact of changes in the opposite direction
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